Workshop GermEval Task 2018

this is the first call to participate in the shared task on identification of offensive language GermEval 2018. We invite everyone from academia and industry to participate in the shared task on Identification of Offensive German Language.

Introduction

Offensive Language is commonly defined as hurtful, derogatory or obscene comments made by one person to another person. This type of language can increasingly be found on the web. As a consequence many operators of social media websites no longer manage to manually monitor user posts. Therefore, there is a pressing demand for methods to automatically identify suspicious posts.

This pilot shared task is to initiate and foster research on the identification of offensive content in German language microposts. Offensive comments are to be detected from a set of German tweets. We focus on Twitter since tweets can be regarded as a prototypical type of micropost.

The workshop discussing this year’s edition of this shared task is planned to be held in conjunction with the Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS ) in Vienna in September 2018.

Data

Some sample data (i.e. 100 manually labeled tweets) and an evaluation script are now ready and available on our website (URL see above). The training data, which are going to be released in April, can be downloaded after registering with the organizing committee. The task evaluations will take place in July 2018. For more details please consult the GermEval-2018 website.

Tasks

We offer the two tasks described below. Participants in this year’s shared task can choose to participate in one or both of them.

Task I — Binary classification

The task is to decide whether a tweet includes some form of offensive language or or not.

Task II — Fine-grained classification

In addition to detecting abusive language tweets, we distinguish between three subcategories:

PROFANITY: usage of profane words, however, the tweet clearly does not want to insult anyone.

INSULT: unlike PROFANITY the tweet clearly wants to offend someone.

ABUSE: unlike INSULT, the tweet does not just insult a person but represents the stronger form of abusive language

Important dates

March 2018 Release of Sample Data

April 2018 Release of Training Data

July 17, 2018 Release of Test Data

August 7, 2018 Submission of System Runs and System Description papers